THE STRUGGLE OF THE UKRAINIAN NATIONALIST UNDERGROUND AGAINST THE SECOND SOVIETIZATION OF THE WESTERN REGIONS OF UKRAINE

Abstract

The article reveals the main forms of resistance by OUN members and UPA soldiers to the Sovietization of the western regions of Ukraine in the first post-war years. The specific approaches of the Bolshevik administration to the implementation of directives of the Union Center aimed at forced collectivization and cultural revolution, religious unification of the region are characterized. For the first time in Ukrainian historiography, methods of support for the participants of the Ukrainian independence movement by the local population are comprehensively revealed: from sabotage to armed resistance. It is proven that after suffering heavy losses, the UPA conducts raids to break into West Germany and Austria. Those units that could not break through were divided into small groups, carrying out attacks on activists of the Soviet government, destroying collective farms, MTS and other economic objects. Propaganda, brutality and insidiousness of the Soviet penal authorities, as well as populist socio-economic changes made it impossible to continue resistance to the Kremlin’s policies for a long time. It has been observed that the active opposition of a significant part of the Western Ukrainian population to Sovietization was put by the Kremlin as a priority for the need to involve party-Soviet functionaries and specialists in various branches of the economy from various regions of the country in the cause of “socialist transformations”. It was also established that by recklessly destroying the traditional way of life, economic forms, socio-cultural and religious practices, the Stalinist regime sought to “reshape” Western Ukrainian society according to its own patterns in the shortest possible time. Brutal violence and coercion in all possible forms became the main instruments of Sovietization policy. The political and socio-economic transformations carried out by the Bolshevik missionaries in the region, which took place in the conditions of the armed struggle of the OUN and the UPA, were studied. Isolation from the world, lack of sources of weapons and ammunition, constant raids and “military Chekist operations”, arrests and deportations of rebel families caused the gradual collapse of the Ukrainian national liberation movement. However, the idea of state independence of Ukraine and the freedom of its population, which the rebels fought for at the cost of their lives, was passed down from generation to generation.